“His journey lasted another three days. The almost mythically endless forests, so vast that Russian cities seem merely perfunctory, tentative dips into a vast and untamable wilderness, eventually yielded to mountains. And the mountains flattened and eroded into steppe: rags and swellings of white laid over a changeless, constant earth, the horizon so distant and visible is seemed an idea.

            During a stop outside of Aktogay, Yuri saw a black scorpion scuttle unto the train before the provodnitsa, a formidable moose of a woman, shooed it onto the tracks with a broom. She told him that an Uzbek man had told her that scorpions bring good luck, so immediately she knew they were no good, and she had ordered all the girls under her to stand watch at the doors with brooms, because they like to sneak their way unto the train. She said that if he should have the misfortune to get bitten by a scorpion, the only remedy was to soak a muslin cloth in vodka infused with St. John’s wort for three minutes and hold it to the wound for thirty-three minutes so the herb could draw the poison from the body into the cloth. Then you must be very careful to burn the cloth well and scatter the ashes.

            At this, the only conversation Yuri had for the entire voyage, he nodded obediently and said nothing. When at last he reached Leninabad and saw the corporal standing by the station’s entrance, he felt suddenly apprehensive about returning to the world of human interaction.

            “Engineer Kulin?” the corporal asked? Yuri nodded. “May I see your documents please? Internal passport and propusk”. The propusk: the all-important little sheet of paper whose official stamp and signature sanctified its information into an unimpeachable truth. If the propusk said that the bearer was ten feet tall and covered in purple scales, and it bore an official stamp from the People’s Deputy of Height Specifications and Scale Certification, and the bearer appeared to be six feet tall and possessed of normal human skin, there was something wrong with the visual evidence: epistemologically, a propusk brooked neither contradiction nor appeal. “ John Fasman (2005). The Geographer’s Library (New York: Penguin Books, pp. 71-72)